Sunday, November 30

I watched 'A Clockwork Orange' again the other night. It's a great film. I didn't realise it was withdrawn in 1972, a year after it was released, due to copycat violence in the UK. And I forgot that Warren Clarke (famous as a TV cop now in the UK) played the 'Dim' Droog!

Saturday, November 29

Of course it isn't an Xmas issue. You'll want a bloody break from Xmas by the time the 25th December comes around (the stores here had baubles and decorations up in fuckin' October), and the new GK gives you just that. Page after page of motorcycles and hot rods that make you (or at least me) a little bit twisted and bitter deep inside because you don't own them yourself.

This was taken outside Snob's shop (right near the Ace Cafe) as a kind of 'before' shot (around '99?); the rigid was a very cheap Santee he had lying under layers of dust in the back of the shop and it did the job – for the right money. Snob was secretary of the London HA and had some great stories. He told me they only took so many drugs in the '70s to help them withstand the pain of long journeys on rigids!

By the way, do old ladies look like that around the world, or is it just in England?

Found this polaroid the other day, taken around '96, showing the FXWG (note the giveaway kicker pedal) before it got chopped. I rode it for quite a while blacked out like this, and liked the look. Dunno what the 'biker' pose was all about. I think I was being ironic.

Tuesday, November 25

Yeah, we've all got our cop stories, but when a cop car pulled up and we got aggressively hassled as we stood on a service station forecourt yesterday, I couldn't quite believe it. Apparently the sight of a Harley chopper, a few tattoos and a couple of beards got the service station staff nervous enough to call the cops. And I haven't heard the last of it apparently...

Wow, this is a conservative country, with the freedoms of its individuals being eroded ever so slightly every day. Maybe the move back to England isn't such a bad idea after all.

Wow ... more crazy cool stuff from Jeff Baer. He says "Check out the bike a friend of mine found recently. It had been sitting for decades. It uses the transmission as an oil tank and a pressurized Whizzer fuel tank. That’s a pressure gauge mounted where the speedo would be. The fork is Harley Hummer. Too much cool stuff on this one! Panhead bottom end, frame and transmission."

So in 1991 I met this hot, long-legged girl at work; hey, she liked motorcycles, and wasn't phased at all by going EVERYwhere on the back of my bike (I didn't do public transport then, and don't now). She even suffered the p-pad on this XLS Sportster to France and back! And then she even got her own bike licence!

And in 2008, we're still together, though we don't have to do the shopping on a H-D any more, and she isn't as tolerant of me spending all my time in the garage...

Tuesday, November 18

My Panhead is in the new issue of Ozbike magazine, one of the big 'custom' mags here in Australia. I think they did a pretty good job with the layout (but didn't use some of the cool riding shots my mate Wasko took). The bike is such a contrast to all the high-dollar billet barges on the other pages, it would be interesting to know what the average reader makes of it. Even though I publish my own mag, I'd be lying if I said I don't still get a little thrill at seeing my bike in print elsewhere.

Thursday, November 13

Got another message from Jeff Baer the other day (check out his flathead racer below). We've been featuring a few bikes from his enviable collection in the mag, and Jeff just keeps revealing more and more amazingly cool stuff! His house looks like a museum. So anyway, Jeff knew that I liked hillclimbers, so sent me these shots with a very cool story to go with them:

"Guy, I noticed on MySpace you mention that you like Hill Climbers. Attached is a picture of one of my Hill Climbers. It won several National championships. In 1939 by A.W. French and two in 1952 by Larry Franz.

I actually met Larry Franz Sr. by accident before he died. I was at an antique motorcycle meet in Ohio a few years after I bought the hillclimber (at the same meet). I saw an old guy with couple of hillclimbers on display and started a conversation with him. I told him I had a hillclimber and knew nothing about it. I began describing the bike to him and he finished the description and told me that it was the bike he won two national championships on in one day in 1952. He also told me some history on the bike and told me what issue of the Harley Enthusiast Mag it was in (which I did not write down and tequila erased most of the info from my memory that weekend). I did manage to get his address written down though. Later that year I found the magazine (September 1952) and had an enlargement done of his article and mailed it to him with a thank you note. I asked him about the history of the bike. I did not get any response.

A couple of years later his son Larry Jr. called me. He found my address in his father's stuff and told me he passed away and thanked me for the poster I sent him. Fast forward to 1996. I was moving and while cleaning out an old desk I came upon an unopened large envelope. I opened it up and it was unfuckin'real! It turns out that a month after I sent Larry Sr. the poster and thank you note (years ago), he had mailed me a letter including the history of the bike from 1939 to the 1960's and enclosed pictures and everything! My ex wife must have gotten the mail that day and stuffed it in the drawer by mistake! Holy shit, this was the coolest fuckin' thing. Unfortunately I found it after he had died.

Fast forward again, a couple of more years go by and I run into his son Larry Jr, at the same swap meet in Ohio. He has a bunch of his dad's stuff including another hillclimb bike his leathers, helmet, boots, spares, jerseys, etc. I bought it all of course!! Larry Jr died last year and his father's Excelsior hillclimber sold at a swap meet in Pennsylvania. I walked up just as the deal was done. (It went for considerably more then I paid for all the stuff I ended up with).

So that's the story, over a period of years this bike and it's history came to me as if it was meant to be...just lucky I guess.

I attached a drunken picture of me the day I bought the bike. I don't remember how I got the bike up or how I got it back down...I'm sure it wasn't pretty. Jeff."

Monday, November 10

Hey, we're really heading off at a tangent from 'greasy' stuff, but I was just thinking about my namesake Guy Fawkes. When I was a kid, I hated the monotonous playground taunting because of my name on 5 November, but now I'm proud to share the name of the man who almost blew up Parliament! (Here's to you Guido, five days late.)

As part of an occasional self-indulgent series looking at my own singles collection that gathers dust under my portrait in the attic, this is one of the UK Subs' finest moments. 'Live in a car' and 'B1C' are tunes I honed my guitar playing skills (?) to, and I always preferred them to the 'A' side, 'CID'. This record still sounds angry, like me.

'The Bikeriders' is one of those books I'm a bit obsessed with. I've always loved documentary photographers (and war photographers like Tim Page and Don McCullin, but they should get a separate post) and I've always loved custom bikes, so Danny Lyon's book is doubly interesting to me. I've got the original '60s first edition, as well as the two Twin Palms editions. The second of these has the colour plates: worth getting.